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I forgot to include that my last day this summer, my boss had told me that the upper-level management had met and wanted to extend a full-time job offer to me. Of course I said I would accept the position after I finished my degree. That same day somebody who usually brings his lunch, let’s call him J, decided to join myself and the other two people, V and B, that I eat lunch with. Myself, J, and B started discussing future jobs for me. This was before my boss had told me about the full-time offer.

I was a bit confused and mad about the conversation. Why confused? Why mad? Well first I was like, ok why are they talking about this? At first I thought were they generally talking about these positions, and wanted my input on them. So, I gave my opinions and such. Then I realised they wanted to place me in these positions to let me gain more experience and be more valuable for them. This is when I was getting mad, because if they wanted this, why didn’t they do this with me this summer? I would certainly have rather learned something new, over sitting there with nothing to do or getting these little BS jobs.

I got back to Seattle on Saturday afternoon (Sept 23). I am not quite settled in yet. I still have a few boxes of things to put away still, but I am getting used to being back up here, and the freedom once again. I don’t have my mother pressuring me to hit the sack at 10:30 pm or whatnot.

When I started this post, I had a few things in mind that I wanted to talk about, but of course I have gotten busy, and simply forgotten them. The school year has offiicially started, beginning last Wednesday. You can see my schedule here. As you can see I am going to be a busy guy. One of my classes is called US Congress. As a political science major, I figured I should learn a wee bit more about the United State’s Congress. But I failed to catch that this class is actually a simulation of Congress. In a week or so, it starts. We had to pick a congressional district that it’s state’s name is within one letter of your last name to mock represent. So of course I said I wanted to represent the Silicon Valley area. When I said that I got a few, what’s that looks.

Once the simulation picks up, I will be basically on-call 24/7, depending on what position I am elected to in our Congress. The other class I am taking is an US Public Policy, it is practically the best class to be taking with the Congress class from what I can tell so far. I have seen a few things already that are overlapping.

My boss saw what it looks like a simple schedule, and scheduled me for a lot of hours to work. Those may have to be cut back in the next few weeks. So, it will be an interesting quarter.

This is my last Monday at my summer job. For those that have been reading my blog for a while, it is the same job I had the past two summers. There were a number of ups and downs, but that comes with every job.

There is one event, however, that still flusters me. One of the things I was supposed to do was do a major overhaul on one part of out site for a few locations. So when my boss was getting the word out that I will be the point of contact, the current guy that is the webmaster went behind my back and told the other locations that he would support them. Then questioned my web design skills/abilities.

I was like fine whatever. Well the otherday he came in and everybody was like whoa you are here. He’s like yeah I have to do this overhaul that’s due September 30th. By this time, I was glancing over my shoulder at him. He just gave my this little smirk. I wanted to punch him.

I also forgot that I have been very busy at work. I have been converting a 60-70 page notebook to Braille-friendly format for the past two weeks. The format was all html files, so you may think 60 pages shouldn’t be bad…well the minimum document is like 2-3 pages in word. I started embossing them Tuesday afternoon. When I have them all done, it’ll be, eh, 400ish pages in Braille.

Don’t worry I already have another set of documents waiting for me, like 9 files. The first one is 45 pages in Word. That’ll be over 100pages in Braille.

Gmail is great. The latest buzz. I think that this is fabulous. It almost gives my boss and I a reason to use gmail more at work. We are often a down around the corner from each other. Often times our questions to each other is pretty quick. Now we can just shoot each other a gTalk message and ask away.

My first question is will it allow offline messages? I find this quite handy at times with like friends that live in different time zones and such.

I feel like I should, and want to update, but there isn’t really anything that comes to mind. Earlier this week, I and a third year PhD Computer Science student figured out what was happening to these two files that I was trying to emboss for almost a month. It took us looking a the byte code that makes up every character. We found out that the three-byte codes that represented a return were not from a Windows or a Mac machine. So since the Computer Science department has unix machines, we thought it was that.

That’s actually not it. Somewhere down the line one of the e-mail programs are messing with the encoding of the file and changing things around. Which the weird thing is that I have been doing this for over two years, and never had this issue in the past. So we are trying to check everything out to figure what is going on.

Between trying to troubleshoot this myself, talking to my boss, and finally this graduate student, I have been wondering about what would have happened if one of the other guys got ahold of this before I did? Of course one of the files in question would not initially even open, so there’s that.

Then of course, on Tuesday and Thursday I got to have fun with the elevator. Tuesday it broke seven or so times, and Thursday only about five times. Each time the on-call repair guys just fixed it long enough to allow me to get to my floor. On Tuesday night, after my night class I had to wait about an hour until they came and fixed it. While I was waiting there, people passed me, sadly only a small number of people stopped and asked why I was chilling there. Unfortunately some of those people didn’t believe me when I said they were broke. That night the elevator doors were completely open with the ground of the elevator about three or four inches above the regular floor. They had to get in and push the buttons to see if they could make it work.

They would climb out and tell me that it must be broken. I tried my best to hide my expression and me saying ‘no shit? really!? I didn’t know.’ They all insisted that they could call somebody. Which everytime except once the only person they could call was about two feet away from me.

That’s all that has been going on here. I will be 22 in 9 days, woooo?

Thursday just about killed me. I had a quiz in Political Science, work, DASA meeting, my night class, then the library (for about 20 minutes). I was gone from 10:30 am till just after 8 that night. Pretty much I paid for that Thursday and somewhat Friday morning. But of course I didn’t get to eat too much, so that is why I had a splitting headache after I got home Thursday night, and woke up at midnight or so with one. Instead of getting up like I planned to I just continued to sleep. The only thing I probably would have done is eat, but the only thing I really have in my cubbord chili. And chili at that time wouldn’t sit particularly well after a while.

I think the quiz in my political science class went fine. I have to check the schedule because although the professor called it a quiz, it was pretty lengthy. On the three IDs that we had to do, I wrote a page in all. Which for me is pretty good. I think and I am hoping I did pretty well on the quiz. I will find that out in a few days.

Work was work. I have been struggling to get some files to work properly. One program, will say this file is crap and has tons of errors. Then another program says that file is all good. I am totally unfamilar with the material, so in the Braille program I can’t tell if everything is being seen. Not to mention that I don’t know the computer language language that they are written in to well.

Then I had to deal with a co-worker. He usually comes in and checks his gmail for the first 20 or so minutes of his shift. My boss has told him that he’s not allowed to do that, we can check mail for 5 or so minutes, but not that long. Of course my co-worker says I check my email. Well, yes I do check mine at work, but he doesn’t realize that I come in almost every day an hour early and stay 30 minutes to an hour every day. Then after a decent amount of time went by I reminded him how he should think about checking the work account. Of course I had to move because the computer I normally work at is set up with Outlook Express.

Of course, instead of grabbing the pdf and letting me go back to work, he had to examine and comment on the thing. What happens is we get a request to do a chapter at a time instead of each picture. Makes sense really, some chapers are 20 to 30 pages, and sometimes have up to about four images per page. Well my co-worker saw that this chapter only had like one or two images, and made a comment about how dumb it was that they had sent us the whole chapter versus the few pages a picture is on. I kindly reminded him how books are scanned and coverted to both plain text and a pdf on a chapter by chapter basis and that it isn’t this partiular senders job to pick out the images. My co-worker didn’t like the idea of that, and how it was a waste of time. I pointed out that it took him maybe a whole minute or two to scroll through this pdf. He told me that i really didn’t understand what it took to make these graphics. Uhm ok, I don’t know how to? How about no? I have been working there since Oct ’03, when I had to hand trace each image on the computer from a screen cap from a pdf, and not the quick task of copying it from a pdf, copying to PhotoShop, adding some Braille in Corel and embossing it.